My friends and I decided just last week to go to Alishan, which is a mountain region famous for its sunrises because of its altitude, high up above the clouds. I've discovered that Taiwan doesn't make it easy to travel to its "must see" destinations like the U.S. does ... to get to Alishan from Taipei, you have a couple of options, all of which include some type of train ride (ranging from 1.5 hours to 5 hours), followed by a winding (and often queasy) 2.5 hour bus ride up the mountain.

Everyone warned me to bring all my heaviest winter clothing because it would be COLD up in the mountains. So, armed with a wool sweater, tights, lots of socks, sucking candy and Coke, I nervously boarded the 4-hour regional train (about $20) headed to Chiayi (or Jiayi), where I would board a bus ($7.50) up to Alishan.

I really liked Chiayi, from what I saw of it. I'd been told that there is nothing of note to do there, but I found the city to be really clean and airy, completely unlike Taipei in many ways. The biggest difference I noticed was the lack of crowds on the streets. During our wait for our bus, we had a light lunch of turkey rice, which is a Chiayi specialty. For just $1, we had this delicious dish:

And the bus ride up was not at all bad. After I asked the bus driver if we could sit up front (they had earlier sat us further in the back), the driver became very friendly and even offered us the seat next to his. There were originally 5 people on board the bus, but as it was a local bus, after a few stops, just us three girls remained for the long ride to Alishan. He gave us lots of tips on what to do while up there, and told us that it hadn't rained in weeks and weeks, but guess what? It was raining, and we'd probably brought it with us from Taipei.


When we finally arrived at Alishan, it was completely and utterly misty and we were exhausted. But we decided to make use of the afternoon and walk one of the trails anyway. Here are some photos from that misty afternoon:

I've been hanging onto this entry for so long that it almost doesn't have any meaning anymore! It's about my last big meal with friends before leaving New York.

Two of my high school friends and I had been having monthly dinners for about a year, and for my last meal before leaving for Taiwan, they wanted me to pick a cuisine I knew I wouldn't be able to have here. Immediately, I knew I wanted Mexican food, but I wanted it to be a fun place, and preferably one in Long Island so we could make one last Target run together (another tradition we began tacking onto our dinners).

I found Cozymels, which is a chain restaurant, so it's definitely not anything unique ... but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun! I loved the atmosphere, which had all the typical skeevy colorful string lights which made it look like a place that should have had the word "tequila" somewhere in its name, and probably the word "sunset" or "rain" somewhere in there too.

While discussing what we would order, we started out conservatively, but over time, I think the mentality became, "to hell with it, it's our last meal together for a long while," so we ordered more food than I knew we could finish.

We started out with guacamole ($10) (warning: all of these photos will be on the greenish side because the lighting in the restaurant was pretty much limited to those colored string lights I mentioned, so we had to get creative and use the light of one smartphone to make everything photo-ready). This was good, made better after we squeezed in the lime juice from our margarita sampler. Not the best guacamole I've ever had (that would be at Toloache in Manhattan and also maybe Rosa Mexicano), but very good nonetheless.

Taipei is famous for its night markets, especially ShiDa Night Market, which is right across the street from one of the country's best universities. To me, the ShiDa Night Market is odd in that it doesn't seem to take advantage of daylight hours when students have time to kill ... the majority of the stores open after 3pm, some after 5pm.

I don't live too far from the Tong Hua Night Market, which I visited with my cousin and her cousin my first week here.

Here is what a typical street in Taipei looks like, during the day:

This "tofu pudding" is sold in the Chinese neighborhoods of New York City, too. When I was a child, it was a treat to get a tub of the stuff, which came with a ginger syrup that could be poured over the pudding to sweeten it and give it flavor. It can be eaten with savory ingredients, too.

And according to my cousin, the place we went to was the most popular one of its kind in Taipei, and frequented by celebrities. She pointed out this wall which was covered in signatures (or autographs, I suppose):

source: backstreetboys-multimedia.blogspot.com Black & Blue Tour, 2001

15-year-old me would be happy to tell you that the first band I ever heard in concert was the Backstreet Boys. My first official concert was Diana Ross at Madison Square Garden, but that wasn't the question. :)

It was February 4, 2001, a Sunday night, exactly a week following Nick Carter's 21st birthday. It was the Black & Blue Tour, and it was at Nassau Coliseum in Long Island. I still remember what I wore -- flares, chunky-heeled black boots and a pink t-shirt that said "It's all good," a phrase Nick commonly used. Our seats were horrible. It was partial-view, and second to last row. The girls who sat behind us in the last row, however, were much more enthusiastic about the concert than most of the girls sitting ahead of them. But it really didn't matter, because it was the first concert I'd bought tickets to, and it was the Backstreet Boys, who I'd probably spent every free moment thinking about over the past 3 years.

I feared, before going into the concert, that seeing them in person would ruin the fantasy for me. Because seeing Diana Ross -- though she was never an object of any of my fantasies -- had killed the illusion of the "superstar." At Madison Square Garden, the intimate audience (the tickets had been a Christmas gift from my father's company) sat at a great distance from the stage, and it was Diana alone in a sparkling red hot number. But even so, she was still only one person and a little one, at that.

The Black and Blue tour did not kill the illusion of the Backstreet Boys for me. There were 5 of them then, and oodles of back-up dancers. The costumes were otherworldly, the lighting dramatic, and the pyro monstrous. I snuck my tape recorder in with me and taped the entire thing, but the screaming was so loud that even I felt stupid trying to listen to the tape more than twice.

The moment that sticks out to me the greatest from this concert was the performance of "I Promise You (With Everything I Am)," which was my favorite song off of "Black & Blue." I've already written about this, but I was so excited (and surprised) that they were singing this song that the moment I realized it, my concert companion (it was her idea, even though she was barely a Backstreet Boys fan) and I ran down the stairs through an entire section to get closer to the stage. Throughout the concert, we'd noticed that the house was not entirely full and there were rows that were empty. Our plan had been to "upgrade" at some point, but we got so caught up in the concert that we forgot. But during "I Promise You," we ran down until we could run no further without taking our eyes off of the guys, and that was to the railing.

For this tour, they had two stages: an end stage and a round one in the middle of the audience which was, of course, closer to us than the end stage. For "I Promise You," they used the round stage, so I watched for a few moments as they sang outwards and occasionally upwards towards the audience, feeling that this would be the closest I might ever be to the Backstreet Boys. And then the security guard shooed us away. To pour salt on the wound, before they got to my favorite part of the song (Nick's part), they transitioned into another song.

I have a couple of New York City posts still up my sleeve, including this one. I got together with two friends from college a week before I left, and they asked what kind of restaurant I wanted to go to. I said I really didn't care, but I wanted "the quintessential NYC experience." So we decided on the famous Katz's Deli, where they filmed that famous scene from When Harry Met Sally:

Believe it or not, this was my very first time at Katz's (205 East Houston Street). I'd always been too intimidated to go alone, and while deli food can be great, it's not something I ever really crave.

Since I wasn't all that hungry, we three girls decided to go with a full pastrami sandwich and a half-corned beef, matzo/h ball soup order. You can't go to this kind of restaurant and not order a matzo/h ball soup!


To top this meal off, we ordered a Dr. Brown's Black Cherry Soda. Dr. Brown's, I think, is a predominantly New York soda brand, and I grew up drinking its cream soda. In the past few years, however, I discovered its Black Cherry soda, which tastes almost revolutionary if you just add a couple twists of lime juice to each glass!

The dishes also came with your typical delicatessen pickles. I prefer the sour type, but delis usually carry the crisper, greener type. We got both kinds and I wasn't impressed.

Katz's, from Il Laboratorio del Gelato

So all in all, not exactly all that it's cracked up to be, but the pastrami sandwich really is pretty good. The atmosphere is kind of what I'd imagine a canteen to be like; it's one L-shaped room. There is a bathroom, but it's literally a telephone booth-sized box in the middle of the smaller end of the "L." It looked like the "chokey" from the outside, the room that poor little Matilda was made to sit inside for hours as punishment in Roald Dahl's novel.

After this, we went for dessert across the street at Il Laboratario del Gelato (95 Orchard Street), which I went to this past summer. Last time I ordered honey lavender gelato and coconut sorbet. The friends I visited with this time were a little more adventurous -- I ordered the Mexican cinnamon while another ordered basil and the last ordered Guinness. Odd mixture, but I liked the basil best. It was really clean and refreshing. The Mexican cinnamon was what you'd think it was (Christmas! In my mouth! And a little spicy.), and the Guinness I didn't care for at all. It had a terribly bitter aftertaste though it started out with dark chocolate or coffee notes and all of that.